He was on a routine medical call with his flight surgeon in Houston. He asked how things were going. The answer was "not very well," and then the doctor told him what had happened in New York and Washington.
Culbertson looked at the map. The station was coming out of Canada and would pass over New England in a few minutes. He grabbed a video camera, found a window, and filmed a gray column of smoke drifting south off Manhattan. He didn't know yet exactly what he was looking at. He said later it was like seeing a wound in the side of his country.
He wrote in a letter home: "It's difficult to describe how it feels to be the only American completely off the planet at a time such as this."
The next day the ground told him the rest. The captain of the American Airlines jet flown into the Pentagon was Chic Burlingame, Naval Academy class of 1971, the same as his. They had met as plebes in the Drum and Bugle Corps, both trumpet players, and sat through the same classes. Both went on to fly Navy fighters.
"What a terrible loss, but I'm sure Chic was fighting bravely to the end," Culbertson wrote. "And tears don't flow the same in space."
He had brought his trumpet to the station to play when the day's work was done.
On September 16 he floated into the Quest airlock and played Taps for his friend. NASA photographed it. The recording was sent down to Earth for the class of 1971's 30-year reunion.
Culbertson came home on December 17, after 129 days in space. Burlingame had been buried at Arlington 5 days earlier.
NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson was serving as the commander of Expedition 3 aboard the International Space Station and was indeed the only American off the planet.
What He Witnessed From Space
- The Vantage Point: Orbiting roughly 250 miles above Earth, Culbertson learned of the terrorist attacks via a call from Mission Control in Houston.
- The Sight: As the space station passed over the East Coast of the United States, he looked out the window and saw a massive plume of smoke rising from Lower Manhattan in New York City.
- The Crew: He shared the station with two Russian cosmonauts (Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Tyurin), who joined him at the windows with profound sympathy and outrage as they passed over the U.S.
